


Giant-Rising

by dragontamer



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Gen, OCs will be kept to the absolute minimum, a "canon is generally the goal but fuck bikini armor" take on canon, any and everything underdeveloped by nintendo is mine now, pretty gerudo centric, slight AU, which is to say
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-17 23:58:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10605027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragontamer/pseuds/dragontamer
Summary: Urbosa ripped the mirror off the wall with shaking hands.A shield, I need the mirror-shield,but she was just clutching glass pressed into parchment-thin wood. The weight in her head, the years, scalding oil bubbling in her not-memories, the armor-cage unyielding against her chest—bars of shadow  through the helmet's grille—the weight in her head—the witches cackling in discordant harmony—Urbosa needed to be able to hold it like a shield, she needed the mirror-shield, why hadn't they keptthatthrough the ages? It had been so sacred. They had bled a temple to honor it, to protect it, and here she was, trying to save her city's life with a seeing-glass. She tore into the edges of the chieftain's sheets with her dagger.Loosely related oneshots centering on the awakening of Vah Nabooris and the formation of Zelda's Champions.





	

"Again."

Hanging guard into a forward strike. Her arms burned with the weight, carried minute over minute like this, but she still kept the point perfect.

She could see a couple of the other trainees staring at her as they stumbled through the drill. The captain stood with her arms crossed, face unreadable. "You've been practicing this on your own."

Urbosa smirked and took the opportunity to sheathe her sword. "Don't need to practice. This is easy." Unlike everything having to do with the goddess-forsaken polearms, this movement was buried deep into one of her not-memories. It was an ancient form. She could almost-remember how they'd all meet behind the city-in-the-cliff to train, at the range, air pungent with the smell of horses—

"Oh. You're just that good, huh?"

"I did kill a Lizalfos when I was four."

"Then get some padding on, trainee. Let's see what you can do when you're not stuck wasting your valuable time."

Urbosa bowed and didn't drop her grin until her back was turned and she was pulling on the quilted sparring jacket. It hung heavy on her shoulders and she fumbled the ties. She was already sweltering by the time she managed to pull on the oversized helmet. It blocked her peripheral vision and threw her half off balance when she turned her head around to face her commanding officer.

"Ready," she lied.

The captain struck from above, lazily, slowly. Urbosa sidestepped and so did the captain, keeping each other squarely on the end of their respective swords. The captain smiled, slightly. _She's toying with me._ Of course she was, she was the _Captain_ and Urbosa was a preteen trainee who rightly should've just been learning to hold a sword, but—but. Urbosa tensed to lunge. She wasn't going to let herself be toyed with like some bug before the kill.

Another voice in her thoughts, deeper, interrupting: _She's waiting for you to do that, kid. Wait for her to swing again. Then move in._

Urbosa hung back and waited for the next overhand strike, then darted off the line and into the captain's range, flipping the blade up, aiming for the ribcage. There had been a name for this movement, but her people had forgotten and she couldn't place the word—

She didn't see the captain move, she just slid through the air, off balance, falling in a sickening forward plunge, and her back stung, and something jangled in the back of her head: another not-memory, a witch's cackle, no—two, in harmony, and her stomach heaving, plate armor like a cell door lashed into her chest.

"Not bad. Did you all see how she worked to try and get me off line? Urbosa, repeat your second reaction to my strike."

Urbosa tottered through her failed counterattack, still sweltering under the stupid padded jacket.

"Look at how she was keeping her weapon perfectly trained on me and moving to try and force me out of position, so I'd need to whirl myself completely around to block her. Can anyone explain why she failed?" The captain demonstrated her reaction again, but this time slowed to a crawl.

"You got behind me." The captain had blurred like cloud-edges, like lightning. Urbosa swallowed down her dizziness, holding that phase in her head, the rapidity. The Yiga weren't going to give her time. Not everything was a waddling Moblin. She would get better, get faster.

"Correct. I—" The captain paused, her attention caught by something up by the palace stairs. "At attention, we have a visitor."

A Hylian stood on the stairs, backed by her Sheikah and with Urbosa's chief a pillar beside her. The Hylian princess still flicked her gaze from target to target with wide eyes, like she had as a child. But her eyes were so much older, sunken and bruised underneath from an obvious lack of sleep. And her shoulders hunched in on her chest. She deliberately focused on the captain and bowed. When she spoke the pacing was wrong, her voice trembled, it was almost like she was reciting a script—but badly, fumbling the delivery. "I'd like to ask a great favor of you, and hire some measure of you to take me to the ruins of the Divine Beast."

The Chief nodded slightly. Approval on the bureaucratic end, at least.

Captain sheathed her sword and rocked back on the heels of her feet. Zelda twisted her fingers in on each other, still that habit from her childhood, chin thrust upward, every part of her wracked in a silent, rigid tension. "We're happy to be of assistance to our Northeastern allies," the captain said, finally. "But it's not that simple. The Beast crumbled many centuries ago. We know it's somewhere under the sands, but not where—it's just rumors, every few decades, of somebody stumbling onto an entrance in the storm."

Zelda nodded. "Has anyone seen it in living memory?"

Every one of her people flicked their eyes over to Urbosa, including the captain. She fought down the urge to break attention and wipe another stinging trail of sweat out of her eyes. The captain nodded, so she stepped forward. "When I was four. It's where I learned how to call down the sky."

Zelda's gaze widened, imperceptibly, noticing her. Remembering their last meeting, maybe. "Could you lead us there?"

* * *

Sand was a particulate, which gave it interesting properties in the aggregate in relationship to hardness and softness. When Zelda was nine she had pried the wooden base off of an hourglass with a letter opener and spread the grains out across her desk, the open prayer book. They slid across each other, soft as silk under the pads of her fingers—but still thrust up individually unyielding as stone when she pressed into the grains with the edge of her thumbnail. (Her tutor had screamed at her for ruining the book, the timer, neglecting her prayers, and she had just rubbed the grains between her thumb and index finger, marveling at the texture.)

Soft as silk in her memory or no, the sand punched into her back with what felt like the force of sheer rock every time she fell. But when she skidded, it yielded almost like snow, even as it scraped her exposed skin raw. Fascinating, really. Impa stopped calling out her title after the fourth fall. Small mercies. Blood from her palms oozed out onto the ground, tiny flecks of gleaming red.

She pushed herself up onto her elbows, then her knees, and finally, she stood. And she reached out and she grabbed the leather seal-tethers and she took another step onto the board. The Gerudo soldiers were pretending not to see her, but they saw, and her father would kill her for letting herself appear so weak in front of them, letting herself be _bloodied_ , even. There would be songs about this in the taverns, she already knew, fast as the Rito harper flies. But everything she had read said that seal-riding was the superior mode of transportation in the sands. So. She was learning.

Zelda cleared her throat, voiced the command word, and the seal lurched forward. The Gerudo mage flashed at the corner of her eye, dangerously close to her seal's path, glinting under the sun like the lightning she channeled. She danced with her scimitar in hand, shifting from pose to pose with a dizzying fluidity. Zelda wasn't an expert on fighting—her efforts to commandeer practice swords from the armory and teach herself from borrowed library manuals had all been thoroughly thwarted by concerned retainers and clucking lectures about Tradition and Wastes of Her Royal Efforts—but to her untrained eye the mage swept through the air like she had years of practice. And the lightning witch hadn't even hit her growth spurt yet, she still stood so short that the proper soldiers towered over her. But her feet cut geometric patterns across the sand and her brilliant blue cloak flared out behind her, the bits of her hair visible under her scarf gleaming red as the canyon stone at sunrise, her sword flashing light. She was incredibly distracting, and _should_ have been standing still like all the older warriors. But she just kept whirling, bright and dervish. 

Zelda didn't even make it to speed before she was flailing again, backwards. Her teeth clacked as she recoiled against the sand, at her feet.

The mage sheathed her scimitar, reached down, gripped Zelda by the palm, and hefted her up to her feet. "You should've taken me up on that seal-surfing lesson back when we were kids."

Zelda managed not to stumble. So the mage remembered their run-in from all those years ago. Probably remembered the bit about Zelda not having her powers yet, too. Great. Not like that was confidential information anyway. She had overheard a ditty about herself in one of the taverns they had rested in. It had compared her to a blind king tasked with picking out clothes. Impa had pretended not to notice.

Zelda managed to reply normally, she hoped. "In retrospect, it was a missed opportunity."

Zelda couldn't remember the mage's name—she wasn't sure, but she had the distinct impression that the mage hadn't given it back when they were children—and it would be a political scandal on the scale of the Great Goron Birthday Mistake to ask for it now, they had already spoken at length twice. Disrespect of the highest order. Almost as bad as eating dirt and scraping her hands apart and delaying an expedition she had asked for in the first place past midday because she was too clumsy to learn the local method of transportation and too stubborn to fall back on a royal carriage. She kept waiting for somebody to say it, but the Gerudo weren't speaking much where she could hear.

"Maybe try leaning forward more. Nose to the board. When you go fast it makes more sense to be tilted as forward as you can. It's impossible to lean too far forward when you're seal-riding."

"I'll try that, thank you."

She clicked out the command word again, this time purposely trying to throw her weight so far forward that she fell on her face instead of her back.

Her stomach bottomed out from under her, and she didn't fall.

The walled city and the group of soldiers shrank behind her, and she still didn't fall.

Dunes rolled on ahead of her. On and on and on. Zelda swallowed down a lump in her throat at the childhood memory of sparkling and thundering sands under the silver starlight, the lightning, magic amplified tenfold through her memory. The sun hadn't been tenderly searing every exposed bit of her skin then. It had been—it was still—awe inspiring. Like those paintings of the mythical "ocean" that she used to sneak into the northwest tower to gawk at, but better. Real. A place you could just keep charging and never hit a single wall, never have to curtsy, never have to stop—

Zelda didn't know how to get the seal to stop. Or turn around. It plunged off a downslope and her stomach dove into her feet again but she threw herself forward even farther, _nose to the board_ , and somehow, kept going. Farther from her retainers and the Gerudo army. They were out of sight behind her now, behind the crest of the hill.

_Well. They can catch up._

Or maybe they wouldn't. Maybe she would have to figure out how to start a fire with just her shield and her stupid crown. Maybe she'd have to kill the seal for sustenance on day two, and then she'd find a cave and live out here for the next twenty years trapping hares and sucking the juices out of hydromelons. She'd wear a crown of braided saffina. The local children would talk about her like a scary moblin and none of the adults would know that she really existed, and she would never have to attend another ball or pray another hideous prayer to Hylia again—

She cut off the inner blasphemy by reflex. _I didn't mean that, Hylia. Please show mercy on me, for the sake of our people. You are infinitely wise and we all rely on you._

She tore a flake of skin off her bottom lip with her teeth and tasted iron, but didn't feel a sting. And then when the prophecy was fulfilled and Ganon struck maybe she would be one of the last to die. She was too old to play stupid selfish games of pretend.

A low thunder interrupted her thoughts. She risked looking over her shoulder and saw the Gerudo troop and her own Shiekah crest the last hill and swing down into formation around her. The lightning mage was cackling, riding her seal with both tethers gripped in her left hand, robes whipping behind her. When she caught Zelda staring she punched the air with her free hand, and Zelda caught the glint of mail under her turquoise robe as the sleeve fell to her elbow.

"Urbosa," the general barked. "Which way?"

The mage squinted at the horizon—looking for what, Zelda couldn't imagine, it all seemed the same to her—and then pointed. "There."

In a pack now, Zelda's seal took its cues from the herd's direction without needing any actual steering from her. Small mercies. She managed to keep her weight on the board as the beast turned in a gradual arc towards their new goal. She would figure out stopping when the time came.

 _Urbosa,_ she told herself, committing the name to memory. Tying the unfamiliar string of phonemes to the laugh and the brown fist cutting into the sky, to the sparks between the child's palms and the flash of sword and mail in the sun.

* * *

Urbosa took her dinner a little apart from the real soldiers, staring wordlessly into the flames and nibbling the—Zelda wasn't sure what it was, exactly, it looked a little like a pink cake but the texture was wrong—but nibbling it a small bit at a time, like she was trying to make the tiny bar last. She had uncovered her head after the sunset, she sat shining like a beacon in her sky blue robe, her burnished hair and dark skin glowing in the firelight. Zelda rolled her bowl of Sheikah meat and rice between her palms, trying not to stare too long, trying to decide. It wouldn't be rude to take her dinner with her attendants, but—there wasn't anyone with powers back in Hyrule besides her. And Urbosa was friendly. Friendly enough. This was an opportunity, her father would say. Time to establish connections.

Zelda steeled herself and stepped towards Urbosa's fire. "It's amazing that you can remember which way to go."

Urbosa snapped her head around to stare at Zelda over her shoulder—oh, Zelda had snuck up on her, that had been rude—Zelda dropped onto the blanket next to her. But that meant neglecting to ask permission to join her for supper first, that had been rude too, but by the time she remembered her etiquette she had already taken her seat and it would be even ruder to ask retroactively and put Urbosa in the awkward position of having to ask her to get up and leave. _Oh, Hylia._ Zelda tried and failed to grab a clump of rice and meat with the Shiekah-sticks and raise them to her mouth.

"I'm not remembering," Urbosa said.

_Oh._

The part of her brain she had probably inherited from her father jumped straight to "assassination attempt", but—probably not an assassination attempt, her Sheikah still outnumbered all the Gerudo. Even in these wastes. And the Gerudo had been allied with Hyrule for all of living memory. They had taken up arms and fought together in the last Calamity. A prank, then? Urbosa smirked and glanced at her sidelong. Zelda had taken a retinue of Sheikah all this way, delayed her pilgrimage by weeks, her father would be _furious_ , she wouldn't be able to risk this again—

"I'm not making it up as I go, either." Urbosa tilted her heads towards the darkness at the edge of their camp. "Can you see that marker?"

All Zelda saw was the sky, completely unobstructed all the way down to the horizon line. So full of stars it hurt to look at. A riddle, then. "Are you following the constellations?"

Urbosa dipped her head and took another bite of her incredibly small dinner. "No."

Zelda squinted out at the edge of the camp, trying to see _it_. Nothing.

"We used to use red banners to mark the way to our temple. The sands were always whirling too thick to see the way without them." Urbosa's mouth twisted, her voice suddenly thick. "We used to _have_ a temple. That's all long gone, I don't even know if that goddess—but—I can see the ghosts of the markers. That's how I found it back when I was four. My family was travelling out to Kara Kara, and I snuck out to go seal-riding and follow the flags. We set up camp by one tonight, but there's another one a kilometer to the southwest. I can see it during the day."

"Oh." Zelda forced herself to eat and it tasted like nothing, it tasted like sand in her teeth. _Not just a lightning mage, an oracle._

"I just thought you might be able to see them too, since you're a Zelda," Urbosa said.

Getting up in the middle of the meal would be a horrendous affront and could cause trade disputes between their peoples for generations to come. A Zelda sat and forced herself to eat her tasteless meal.

Urbosa didn't let the silence last long. "You really got the hang of seal-surfing towards the end, there."

Zelda stared at her own forearms, covered in bruises like ink-splotches and her knuckles scraped raw. "I should have just chartered a carriage like Papa wanted. I looked weak and stupid."

"You looked very brave. Clumsy, and not particularly regal, but brave. Nobody gets on the board and learns how to do surf on their first try."

"What're you eating?"

Urbosa broke a corner off the bottom of the bar and handed it to Zelda. It stuck a little to Zelda's fingers. "Trail rations. Dried voltruit and seal jerky, crushed to powder, mixed with seal lard. I don't know if it has a Hylian name."

"Oh! I read about this in the _Historia_ , it's fantastic. You could keep whole armies supplied with so little space for the food. Thank you so much, I've wanted to try this since I read about it but the cooks wouldn't let me anywhere near the meat stores and Impa said I'd give myself first degree burns when she caught me trying to melt the lard and then Papa forbade me from further cooking experiments." Zelda popped the corner of the bar into her mouth. It tasted... thick. And melted in her mouth in the way dinner absolutely shouldn't.

Urbosa laughed. It was a hard, open laugh, reminiscent of a pealing brass bell. Her whole head tilted back, mouth wide open. "We don't relish the flavor either, your majesty. I'm sorry if I've affronted your noble tastes."

"It tasted adequate," Zelda tried to say, and that set Urbosa laughing again. "Do you want to try mine? It's Sheikah. Just fried rice and salted fish, they didn't want to bring too much on the road."

Urbosa shoved down the last bit of her bar and took the bowl out of Zelda's hands. "Would love to try fish. Thanks." Her mouth twisted again as she looked at the Sheikah-sticks—she grabbed them both and clamped them an inch apart from each other in a white-knuckle grip. She tried to stab the dish and catch a chunk of rice and meat into the gap, repeatedly. "Your giggle is noted and unnappreciated."

"Here—" Zelda reached out and caught Urbosa's fingers in her own. Urbosa's eyes glinted bright, bright green. Zelda positioned the Sheikah-sticks across the webbing of her thumb, Urbosa's fingertips were callused—Zelda let go. "There. So you keep the bottom one straight and move the top one up and down."

Urbosa practiced the motion. "Ah." She managed to eat a clump of the dinner, finally. Her expression didn't change, but she handed the bowl back to Zelda. "Thank you. Fish is rancid."

"It is not!"

"It definitely is. I'm getting something to wash out my mouth with, be right back."

Zelda tried to focus on the spot where the marker _wasn't_ , tried to let herself find her center, be one with the sand, commune with Hylia. But she didn't have it in her to pray.

She saw nothing.

This was why she was here. The Divine Beasts didn't rely on the whims of the gods or some ill-explained power. They relied on _facts_ , on _logic_ , they could be explained. She could make them work, at least. If she just could find them first.

**Author's Note:**

> If you think I'm calling this "loosely related oneshots" to try and escape the shame of delivering another stillborn longform fic with my bloodied hands thanks to a technicality of categorization you are 100% correct. Can't abandon fics that don't have committed ending points. But I do have 2 other chapters of this written already so there is more coming. Chronological order unlikely.


End file.
